Zechariah

Zechariah

Luke 1:5-25

Almost everyone has a dream and almost every dream ends up by the wayside.  If you talk to a child and ask them what they want to be when they grow up, you will hear lots of dreams:  an astronaut, a tiktok personality, a firefighter, a professional athlete—the list goes on and on.  Every now and then we run into someone who actually does grow up to do what they always dreamed of doing.  If you’re a golf fan, you watched Dustin Johnson make the winning putt on the 18th green at the Masters this year, knowing that he had grown up an hour away from Augusta and spent his childhood imagining that put.  We love to hear about people who achieve their dreams.  It makes us feel like anything is possible.

Most of us don’t live our dreams.  Here is the secret, though.  What we live turns out to be better than we could have imagined—not more glamorous but more meaningful, more adult and more real.  It’s like the old country song about thanking God for unanswered prayers.  Thank God that I didn’t stay with that girlfriend or get the first job that I wanted or get the big payday without the effort because the people who showed up or the slog through early jobs or the hard work and low reward times in my life were an essential part of what made for the life that I now live and love.  We’re not smart enough or omniscient enough or powerful enough to know what should happen or when it should happen.  We’re not God.  We just show up, day in and day out, and do the best we can to find the meaning and the chance to live our faith, today.

In order to stay present today, we have to learn how to let go of yesterday’s dreams.  We’ve all been working on that project in an intensive way for months now.  There are all of our expectations:  for birthdays, for anniversaries, for the 4th of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas.  There are the simple expectations we have about time together with family and friends.  There are all the things that we do in a day without even thinking about them that bring us comfort and warm our hearts.  For months now, we’ve had to let go of a lot of those things.  This can be a real source of grief.  Those losses are real.  However, at some point, we realize that whatever it is that we we wish could happen just isn’t going to happen this year.  We have to let go.

Learning to let go is such a critical skill in this life.  Things change.  People grow and move on.  We are not in control.  Whether we deem the change welcome or unwelcome, fair or unfair, life goes on.  The question is whether we will find the ways to grieve and then move on with life.  Are we willing to see what’s next, even when it seems like there might not be a next left?

This is where we meet Elizabeth and Zechariah this morning.  They have lived good and faithful lives and undoubtedly made all sorts of adjustments and let go of a lot of things along the way.  However, the biggest hole in their hearts was the fact that they had never been able to have a child.  Luke puts the matter this way:  “Together they lived honorably before God, careful in keeping to the ways of the commandments and enjoying a clear conscience before God.  But they were childless because Elizabeth could never conceive, and now they were quite old.”  It’s not hard to imagine how many times they had hoped for that child and how many times those hopes had been dashed.   It would have been enough to shatter a lot of people not to mention marriages.  Elizabeth and Zechariah found a way to grieve that loss and move on.  

Because being a pastor and being a therapist means that I spend time with people as they grieve their losses and mourn for their unfulfilled dreams, I recognize Elizabeth and Zechariah as part of an amazing group of people in this life whose losses don’t break them but deepen them.  They could have become bitter or jaded.  They could have just walked around angry at God or the gods or whoever allowed this terrible loss to happen.  Instead, over time, they learned how to let go.  They found meaning in what is instead of getting lost in the way that they wished things might be.  There are a lot of those people in life, most of whom, like Elizabeth and Zechariah, go largely unnoticed.  It’s the part of me that always ends up realizing that I had no idea what this person was carrying until they trusted me and told their story.  Then, I can’t get it out of my mind how brave they are…

So, here is this childless couple who are long past the point of dreaming of what the nursery is going to look like, much less what it would be like to hold their own child.  They are just living their lives.  One day, Zechariah is doing what he does—being a low-level priest—and he learns that it is his big day.  He is going to get his once in a lifetime chance to go where the high priests usually only get to go:  to burn incense in the innermost sanctuary of God.  The crowds are gathered outside the sanctuary.  Everything and everyone is buzzing.  This is a big ritual, a big moment in a common guy’s day.  He’s the employee of the month who gets the special parking place.  He’s the guy who gets to have lunch with the CEO.

Then, the weirdest, most unexpected thing happens.  Luke tells us that shockingly, in the holiest of holy places, something holy actually takes place!  (You have to appreciate Luke’s humor here:  “Who would have ‘thunk it,’” as we used to say.)  The sacred was so institutionalized that the last thing anyone expected was for something sacred to unfold.  However, amazingly, an angel appears.  That angel tells Zachariah that he and Elizabeth are going to have a son and that son is going to be named John and John is going to be a great man, loved by many people and by God.  He is going to be the one who prepares the way, who gets the people ready for God.

What does Zechariah do?  He argues with the angel:  “This can’t be!”  Before we dismiss his response, we need to offer him a little human understanding.  When you’ve had a dream and done the hard work of grieving that dream being unfulfilled and you’ve come to truly accept that loss, what is any human being’s response when life says, “Hey, you know that dream, it’s about to happen now?”  We look life (or even an angel) in the eye and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”  It’s terrifying to think that we might be opening up all those hopes only to be disappointed again.  So, unless you’ve somehow shed your humanity, don’t you dare dismiss Zechariah!

However, do learn from his story.  What does the angel do?  The angel makes Zechariah mute.  He is silenced.  I want to invite you to think of this not so much as a punishment but as an invitation, not just to Zechariah but to all of us, to understand that when we see something that is too good for words, perhaps we shouldn’t utter any words at all.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, is going to ponder a lot things in her heart.  Maybe it is a good thing that Zechariah was invited to do a little less “mansplaining.”  Maybe, in the face of wonder and awe and mystery, the notion of a little less talk would serve us well, too.

Of course, Luke’s audience would have heard this story about the announcement of John’s birth and connected to a layer that we might not immediately recognize.  There is a delicious irony in thinking that John’s father would learn about John in the most holy place in the temple.  What is that irony?  The twist is that John would grow up and be famous for wanting to have nothing to do with the temple and all of its rituals.  The temple had fancy urns filled with holy water.  John baptized in the River Jordan.  The priests were trained.  John was out in the wilderness, screaming and winging it.  John rejected wine and comfortable clothes and feasted on locusts.  However, this whole John the Baptist thing—it was a life grounded from word one in God.

We are told that in his silence, Zechariah ponders things.  We learn that seeing his silence, the crowds are convinced that something powerful has taken place, which really ought to be a lesson for all of us who feel like the only thing we have to offer as evidence of faith is more words.  Finally, Elizabeth thanks God and relishes the chance that she is given by God to be a mother.  (Plus, she gets five or six months of a blissfully silent husband to cherish, too!)  Things are changing.  When it seemed like all was lost, hope is reborn—in God’s own way and in God’s own time.

All of this would have been terribly important to Luke’s readers for one simple reason.  John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth were so linked to one another in their adult lives.  In fact, John, himself, had a lot of followers.  Both would live their faith.  At points their lives and their followers would intersect.  Both would die terrible deaths at the hands of the authorities.  Luke makes the suggestion here to the followers of John and the followers of Jesus that they were linked from the start and that this connection was the work of God.  When it comes to John and Jesus, it’s not a matter of either/or.  Rather, it is a matter of  both/and.  John is essential to preparing the way for Jesus.

So, we are invited to see that faithful people can be challenged to live with broken dreams.  We are reminded that sacred things can happen in the most unexpected places (like the holiest place in the temple!).  We get a lesson on what to do in the face of mystery and good news:  stop arguing with what’s real, learn that silence sometimes speaks more profoundly than words and relish the unexpected when it arrives.  (And, of course, we can pause and enjoy the fact that Luke is pointing out that the unexpected news is that this elderly couple is expecting!)

Here’s the final thing, though. As faithful people, Zechariah and Elizabeth would have been steeped in the stories of faith, the stories that had been told for generations.  Luke’s readers would have been steeped in those stories, too.  Because of this, what everyone involved would have heard in this moment with this elderly couple would have been a resonance with the foundational story of Abraham and Sarah.  Like Zechariah and Elizabeth, Abraham and Sarah had spent their lives being blessed in many ways but with broken hearts because they could not have a child of their own.  This was considered a curse from God in a world that had almost no medical understanding.  On the day when Abraham and Sarah are told that they are going to have a child, they burst out laughing—which is not the normal way that most people respond in God’s presence.  In fact, they name their son, “Isaac,” which means laughter. It’s hard, when you take that story to heart, to not imagine the age lines around Abraham and Sarah’s eyes not only bending with those smiles but filling with streaming tears in the face of that good news.

There is an old saying about “Letting go and letting God.”  It might seem trite but it’s true.  When we let go of how things would work if we were God and let God be God, sometimes God surprises us.  The thing we thought would never happen, happens.  The wound that we thought would never heal, heals.  What never made sense to us about our lives starts to come together.  As it comes together, we ponder things.  We relish what’s happening.  Then we realize the bigger point—that this is how God’s worked in life all along!